Modern society has adopted, and is becoming reliant upon, wireless communication devices for various purposes, such as connecting users of the wireless communication devices with other users. Wireless communication devices can vary from battery powered handheld devices to stationary household and/or commercial devices utilizing an electrical network as a power source. Due to rapid development of the wireless communication devices, a number of areas capable of enabling entirely new types of communication applications have emerged.
Cellular networks facilitate communication over large geographic areas. These network technologies have commonly been divided by generations, starting in the late 1970s to early 1980s with first generation (1G) analog cellular telephones that provided baseline voice communications, to modern digital cellular telephones. GSM is an example of a widely employed 2G digital cellular network communicating in the 900 MHZ/1.8 GHZ bands in Europe and at 850 MHz and 1.9 GHZ in the United States. While long-range communication networks, like GSM, are a well-accepted means for transmitting and receiving data, due to cost, traffic and legislative concerns, these networks may not be appropriate for all data applications.
Short-range communication technologies provide communication solutions that avoid some of the problems seen in large cellular networks. Bluetooth™ is an example of a short-range wireless technology quickly gaining acceptance in the marketplace. In addition to Bluetooth™ other popular short-range communication technologies include Bluetooth™ Low Energy, IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN), Wireless USB (WUSB), Ultra Wide-band (UWB), ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.15.4a), and ultra-high frequency radio frequency identification (UHF RFID) technologies. All of these wireless communication technologies have features and advantages that make them appropriate for various applications.
At least one communication-related application currently being offered in various forms is electronic positioning. Basic electronic positioning may provide the current location of a device in terms of a footprint and associated GPS location based techniques. WiFi is used in an indirect way to determine the location of a mobile device (MD). WiFi network footprints are collected in a centralized database, the footprint is associated with a GPS location, and then uploaded to a Location Information Server (LIS). When a mobile device scans for WiFi beacons, it reads the MAC address of the beacon and sends it to the Location Information Server. The Location Information Server will then provide an approximate location to the mobile device.
What is needed is a location determination method that does not depend on a GPS location of the original observer where a previous WiFi beacon was originally seen, which is not an accurate measure of the current location of the mobile device. Even if multiple access points were identified and triangulation were used based on the GPS coordinates of the previous observer, this would not improve the accuracy of the measurement of the current location of the mobile device.
What is needed is a location determination method that enables a WiFi network to provide to the mobile device, its current location.
Where there are WiFi hotspots that are operated by diverse service providers that do not share a common database, what is needed is a location determination method that does not depend on a single centralized database.